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ICANN's brain drain?
Thursday, April 3. 2008
Interested to learn, thanks to Francesco, that Tina Dam might soon be heading home. Since 2003, Tina has been a prominent member of ICANN's staff, first as liaison to the gTLD registries, and since 2006 as manager of the IDN program.
Nature has undoubtedly been kind to Tina, (who would rather not dwell on her past as an ex miss Denmark :-), a bright individual who has brought ICANN qualifications as diverse as maths, physics and business (she has a Master of Science in Mathematics and Physics and a BBA in Marketing Management and International Trade.)
She clearly understands the very difficult topic of IDNs better than most. Not only that, on several occasions she's actually managed to explain it to me in such a way as I could understand it as well! No mean feat.
And she's passionate about it, something which has fuelled the recent progress made by ICANN on IDN TLDs (making non-ASCII characters work for the part left of the dot, the suffix), culminating in the current successful live test of 11 non-English scripts as IDNs (two new scripts have just been added).
So if people like Tina are leaving ICANN, will the organisation suffer from it? And why would they be thinking about leaving in the first place? I can't say for the first question, but I do have an idea about the second...
In one word: stress. I don't think people realise quite how much work ICANN's staff does, and how thinly stretched they are to cover all of ICANN's myriad obligations to the Internet community, governments, registrars, registries, etc.
In the past few years, both in my position as the General manager of a registrar and as a journalist specialising in domain name related issues, and even more recently as a member of the Paris meeting launching group, I've worked closely with some of the always-there-behind-the-scenes but not often up-on-the-stage-catching-the-limelight ICANN staff (Tina's actually an exception there, as she does like to hog the stage on occasion 
).
Because ICANN has to be extremely accountable to its community, especially when it's spending money, the staff are asked to "take up a lot of the slack". The result is nothing but a cliché in today's business world: extremely long hours (some members of staff never manage more than 3 to 5 hours' sleep a night during actual ICANN meeting weeks for example), and physical and mental fatigue.
The irony is that the level of pressure from the community seems to be permanently on the rise. As ICANN, rightly so, doesn't want to be seen as squandering its budget (the majority of which comes from the registrars), it has to keep on finding ways to cut some costs. The latest idea, for example: no more business class.
While the larger seats and better comfort of the business cabin might seem like unnecessary indulgences. They're probably crucial to anyone flying long hauls constantly. It's just a small thing. But it is quite emblematic of the problem. Recently, Tina told me that in one month, she'd actually spent two days at home! All the rest were business trips to Europe. Imagine all the flying that represents. Would you want to do all that in coach? How long would you last before you started to think "new job"?
So there we have it. ICANN may be the place to be for domain name professionals who want to spend time at the core of their industry, but is the personal price to pay just too high? One thing's for sure: if ICANN starts seeing its talented staff members up and go, then we will all be losing something.
